December 8, 2010

After US Senator and climate denier James Inhofe criticized the Obama administration for appropriating $1.3 billion dollars into a climate fund for developing countries struggling to adapt to the impacts of a changing climate, climate scientists struck back. Now the Bangladesh Environmental Minister of one of the most vulnerable countries to sea level rise in the world has this to say in Cancun in response to Inhofe

August 31, 2010

An eye opening report on ocean acidification. The press release from the Geological Society is below

A unique ‘natural laboratory’ in the Mediterranean Sea is revealing the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels on life in the oceans. The results show a bleak future for marine life as ocean acidity rises, and suggest that similar lowering of ocean pH levels may have been responsible for massive extinctions in the past.

25 August 2010

The scientists, from the University of Plymouth and the University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, studied a single celled organisms called Foraminifera around volcanic carbon dioxide vents off Naples in Italy. The study, published in the September issue of the Journal of the Geological Society, found that increasing CO2 levels caused foram diversity to fall from 24 species to only 4.

‘Previous studies have shown a reduction in diversity of 30%, but this is even bigger for forams’, said Dr Jason Hall-Spencer, one of the study’s co-authors. ‘A tipping point occurs at mean pH 7.8. This is the pH level predicted for the end of this century’.

Rising carbon dioxide levels acidify the ocean, which has a particularly devastating effect on organisms that have calcium carbonate shells, like Foraminifera.

‘Forams are well preserved in the fossil record, which is why we chose to study them’, says Dr Hall-Spencer. ‘We knew the results were likely to show a decline in foram diversity but we weren’t expecting such a seismic shift’.

Forams record past events in the geological record – in particular, the effect of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period of massive carbon release and rapid warming, 55 million years ago, accompanied by extinctions in marine life. It is also thought to have seen a period of ocean acidification.

‘That was a period when massive changes in marine ecology happened’ says Dr Hall-Spencer. ‘Our natural laboratory provides a glimpse into the future of our oceans’.

‘These are the first CO2 vents to be used to study ocean acidification. They allow us to observe how ecosystems react to changes in ocean acidity. We can see for our own eyes what increasing CO2 levels do to marine communities’.

‘At a mean pH level of 7.8, calcified organisms begin to disappear, and non calcifying ones take over. We are headed towards that being the case in this century. The big concern for me is that unless we curb carbon emissions we risk mass extinctions, degrading coastal waters and encouraging outbreaks of toxic jellyfish and algae.’

Co-author Professor Malcolm Hart will be presenting the research to the 2010 FORAMS meeting in Bonn on Friday 6 September. This weekend, Deborah Wall-Palmer will present the work being done at Plymouth on the last 250,000 years of ocean acidification at the International Palaeoceanography Conference in San Diego, being held on 29 August – 3 September.

Full bibliographic information ‘Modern seawater acidification: the response of foraminifers to high-CO2 conditions in the Mediterranean Sea’

The capital has 1,500 places available in its morgues, and 1,300 of them are now filled, he said, blaming the heat wave and pollutants for the deaths.”

“Today the head of the state weather service, Alexander Frolov, said the heat wave was the worst in 1,000 years of recorded Russian history, with temperatures above 95 degrees forecast for Moscow until Thursday.

A total of 557 wildfires continued to blaze today in Russia, mostly in the west, the emergencies ministry said, 25 of them burning peat bogs, and 10,000 firefighters are backing up soldiers trying to bring the blazes under control. The ministry said the death toll is at least 52.”

August 7, 2010

See here from meteorologist Jeff Masters, and more on the out of control wildfires here.

“The Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 continues
One of the most remarkable weather events of my lifetime is unfolding this summer in Russia, where an unprecedented heat wave has brought another day of 102°F heat to the nation’s capital. At 3:30 pm local time today, the mercury hit 39°C (102.2°F) at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport. Moscow had never recorded a temperature exceeding 100°F prior to this year, and today marks the second time the city has beaten the 100°F mark. The first time was on July 29, when the Moscow observatory recorded 100.8°C and Baltschug, another official downtown Moscow weather site, hit an astonishing 102.2°F (39.0°C). Prior to this year, the hottest temperature in Moscow’s history was 37.2°C (99°F), set in August 1920. The Moscow Observatory has now matched or exceeded this 1920 all-time record five times in the past eleven days, including today. The 2010 average July temperature in Moscow was 7.8°C (14°F) above normal, smashing the previous record for hottest July, set in 1938 (5.3°C above normal.) July 2010 also set the record for most July days in excess of 30°C–twenty-two. The previous record was 13 such days, set in July 1972. The past 24 days in a row have exceeded 30°C in Moscow, and there is no relief in sight–the latest forecast for Moscow calls for high temperatures near 100°F (37.8°C) for the next seven days. It is stunning to me that the country whose famous winters stopped the armies of Napoleon and Hitler is experiencing day after day of heat near 100°F, with no end in sight.

Thousands of deaths, severe fires, and the threat of radioactive contamination
The extreme heat has led to thousands of premature deaths in Russia. According to Yevgenia Smirnova, an official from the Moscow registry office, “We recorded 14,340 deaths in Moscow in July, that is 4,824 deaths more than in July, 2009.” Undoubtedly thousands of additional premature deaths have occurred in the rest of Russia as a result of the heat. The heat has also caused the worst drought conditions in European Russia in a half-century, prompting the Russian government to suspend wheat exports. The drought has caused extreme fire danger over most of European Russia (Figure 3), and fires in Russia have killed at least 50 people in the past week and leveled thousands of homes. The fires are the worst since 1972, when massive forest and peat bog fires burned an area of 100,000 square km and killed at 104 people in the Moscow region alone. Smoke from the current fires spans a region over 3,000 km (1,860 miles) from east to west, approximately the distance from San Francisco to Chicago. Dozens of flights were canceled at Moscow’s airports today, thanks to visibilities of 300 meters in smoke. Also of concern is fires that have hit the Bryansk region of western Russia, which suffered radioactive contamination from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine. There are fears that fires may burn through the contaminated area, releasing harmful radiation into the atmosphere.”

“Ocean warming currents are circulating around the fjord here and eroding the underbelly of Petermann Glacier at an incredible rate, which is 25 times that of the surface melt,” Alun Hubbard, a glaciologist at the University Of Wales, told the Sydney Morning Herald at the time. “There’s been a revelation in the last couple of years in the role that warming oceans play in triggering the enhanced acceleration, break-up and thinning of these outlet glaciers.”

August 5, 2010

“Frankly, what is going on with the world’s climate at the moment should incite us all (I mean world leaders and heads of public organizations) to make a more strenuous effort to fight global climate change.”

“…our country has not experienced such a heat wave in the last 50 or even 100 years… I want to say that this is, of course, a severe trial for our country, a great trial indeed. But at the same time, we are not alone in facing these hardships, for other countries too have gone through such trials and, despite all the difficulties, have managed to cope with the situation. … Overall, we need to learn our lessons from what has happened, and from the unprecedented heat wave that we have faced this summer.

None of us can say what the next summer will be like. The forecasts vary greatly.Everyone is talking about climate change now. Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past. This means that we need to change the way we work, change the methods that we used in the past.”

August 4, 2010

Typically when we think of Russia we think of Rocky IV where everything is frozen. I’ve heard it mentioned before that Russia doesn’t have as much incentive to address greenhouse gas emissions because a warmer climate would actually stand to benefit them. Well, now that Russia is discovering what it’s like to have a heat wave, perhaps they’ll be a little more receptive to the notion that there is such a thing as too hot.

See the Washington Post article “Think Smog from Raging Wildfires Engulfs Moscow” to see that I mean. A couple excerpts are below.

“Moscow was engulfed Wednesday by the thickest blanket of smog yet this summer, an acrid, choking haze from wildfires that have wiped out Russian forests, villages and a military base.”

“Russia is suffering through its worst heat wave on record, a condition that has sparked forest and peat fires across its central and western regions that have killed at least 48 people in the past week.

Over the last 24 hours, firefighters have extinguished 293 fires, but 403 others have been spotted and more than 500 others have continued to rage over large swathes of countryside, some of them out of control, the Emergencies Ministry said.

Dry winds have sent clouds of smog over Moscow before, but Wednesday’s was the worst yet, with the haze obscuring the capital’s landmarks and penetrating the subway system.

Moscow’s 10 million residents were cautioned to protect themselves against the polluting smog, which came from wildfires in forests and peat bogs to the south and east. The bogs were drained in Soviet times to harvest peat, leaving them prone to wildfires.”